Super cool story.

A group of US science students have upstaged NASA by sending a camera into near-space to take pictures of Earth using off-the-shelf items costing just $US150 ($170).

Displaying stunning ingenuity reminiscent of MacGyver, the MIT students filled a weather balloon with helium and strapped it to a styrofoam beer cooler containing a cheap Canon A470 camera that was programmed to take photos every five seconds.

The students - Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee and Eric Newton - placed hand warmers inside the beer cooler to ensure the camera and battery did not freeze in the -40-degree temperatures.

The balloon popped after about four hours once it was about 28 kilometres high, causing it to spiral back to the ground. The drop was relatively smooth and took about 40 minutes thanks to a parachute attached to the cooler.

But a prepaid Motorola mobile phone equipped with GPS technology, which was placed inside the cooler, allowed the students to keep track of the rig's location and retrieve it once it landed - about 32 kilometres from the launch site.

Source: The Age



http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/2174/icarus4600x400.jpg

haha that sort of technology was movie stuff only 10 or 15 years ago

It's not reminiscent of MacGyver unless it used chewing gum.

I used to make these cool hot air ballons out of tissue paper and cotton balls soaked in metho. They used to go sweet until you lost sight of them and then hope you set nothing on fire.

nice idea but the pictures were pretty useless.

A+ for effort
pitty there isn't much to see in the images

A+ for effort
pitty there isn't much to see in the images

Yeah they should have pointed the camera downwards. Or done the experiment at night.

A group of US science students have upstaged NASA by sending a camera into near-space to take pictures of Earth using off-the-shelf items costing just $US150 ($170).

That article is pretty f***ing stupid. How exactly did the upstage NASA? NASA puts s*** IN space, not near it.

That nitpick aside, the idea was great, hopefully next time they use a camera on the side and one pointing down and at night would be very cool :)

It's conceivable that the project could be completed for under $US100, which pales in comparison with the billions of dollars NASA spends on its space projects.

yeah thats a fair comparison

Wasn't something like this done a while ago? Or was I reading a work log of these guys building it? I remember reading something like this maybe 3-4 months ago.

parabol needs to get involved. He'll know what to do. :D

This one was cool, too. http://bear.sbszoo.com/bear3-4/bear4.htm

How exactly did the upstage NASA? NASA puts s*** IN space, not near it.

It cost them $170 to put s*** near space, it costs nasa $40000,00000 billion trillion to put s*** in space.

This one was cool, too. http://bear.sbszoo.com/bear3-4/bear4.htm

That one is way better to watch

This is an awesome image showing the flight path of BEAR-4:

http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/3524/b4path.jpg

It cost them $170 for a few minutes of video. NASA spends a few billion (hubble telescope) has been taking deep space images for the last (nearly) 2 decades.

Wasn't something like this done a while ago?

Well actually there have been heaps of projects like this in the past. Some started with VHS recordings in the 80s, others just time-lapse stills, and others with HD video recently.

Although they are nothing compared to NASA's manned spaceflight, they are quite an interesting engineering challenge.

Hell, even strapping a camera to a cat is interesting:

http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/pe_cc_u.htm


last edited by parabol at 16:57:20 25/Sep/09

holy s*** i so wanna do that to my cat

Fuk, how hard to watch was that video?!

Anyway, nice work kids. It doesnt look like they've really done anything new though.

Edit: That 2nd vid is a lot better Pinky! Those guys know what there doing.

last edited by E.T. at 17:26:03 25/Sep/09

It cost them $170 for a few minutes of video. NASA spends a few billion (hubble telescope) has been taking deep space images for the last (nearly) 2 decades.

If they can also look at other universes with their $170 setup then I will agree.

It cost them $170 to put s*** near space, it costs nasa $40000,00000 billion trillion to put s*** in space.

Including humans and landing on the moon and sending drones and other vehicles too other planets.

Again, I agree what they did is cool, but comparing them to nasa is f***ing stupid.

I'm glad everybody else thought those photos were pretty useless/boring.